Where to session.commit() for a SELECT query - SQLALchemy, Flask

Question

My application does not update the database - all queries are SELECT statements. I'm struggling how best to handle direct changes to the database (ie opening MySQLWorkbench and changing data there). Without session.commit() , my Flask application is returning stale data.

My solution right now is to have a session.commit() as the first line of each Flask endpoint, but I feel this is the incorrect way of handling this.

Session creation at start of app:

engine = db.create_engine('mysql+pymysql://...')
connection = engine.connect()
metadata = db.MetaData()

Base = declarative_base()

Session = sessionmaker(autoflush=True)
Session.configure(bind=engine)
session = Session()

Answer 1

session.expire_all() to mark all session data as expired. Then when you are trying to access something, it will be fetched from the database.

session.expire(object) does the same but for objects only

db.session.refresh(some_object) expires and reloads all object data

Nice article about that can be found here: https://www.michaelcho.me/article/sqlalchemy-commit-flush-expire-refresh-merge-whats-the-difference